The Dreams That Dream Me

from the land of dreams in the misty island. Or, alternatively, from the flat above a shop on the Kentish Town Road, amidst the shouts of the midnight drunks and the police sirens.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

dreams

I find frustrating waking up from what I know was a beautiful significant or disturbing dream and not be able to recall more than the sensation it leaves you with, none of the plot and hardly any of the imagery, as it were.

There are recurrent themes and features in my dreams, although I don't have recurrent dreams in the sense of exactly the same dream appearing repeatedly. Some can be so very obviously 'interpreted' that it bores me extraordinarily to do so. The fact that my old house in Catia in Caracas keeps growing new rooms which I have to explore, the problems with the toilets and the stairs in that house are a reflection of both the problems that we had with that house slowly crumbling away and of any present difficulties of those and other kinds, but it is boring for me to think of that in those terms. The new rooms always have both promise and danger and some element of disgustedness (sorry about the neologism), if I can cal it that. I often look over the azotea to see my current car, the Peugeot, parked in front of the laundry shop of the Sicilian family with the brother and sister standing wobbling looking at the street, he rocking from side to side, she turning her head sideways continuously in a tic that I used to find perturbing. They ended up being vastly more successful than I was, they seemed to despise us for being sort of poor (or so I perceived it, but have learnt since how bad a judge of those things I am) and we thought they were sort of naff. It all often is a night scene, with the yellow moon surging from above the Avila mountains, making the sky deep, deep blue and the mountains deep, deep black. In the distance, the 'super blocks' two miles away on the hills of 23 de Enero, twinkled with the thousands of lights of the flats. I, in the meantime, would have to struggle with my room having become a patchwork of overflowing toilets on platforms at different levels, the floor flooded in clear blue water in which you could see shoals of small golden fish darting by, while I swore and swore..

I was thinking about those Caracas skies of my dreams (and my memories, although these are never as vivid as the dreams) yesterday evening as I was walking back home. It was a beautiful evening here, with deep deep blue sky above, bright orange at the horizon. And freezing.

I often dream of getting lost while travelling. Most often it is about something wrong having taken place while travelling. For quite a few years after I came here, it would be going back to Caracas for a few months and then finding myself unable to come back here, which would make me lose my flat, my guitar (which would have stayed here), my computer and my pupils. I had, in return, a nice little '40s or '50s house -like a cottage, in some place that wasn't Los Magallanes but was a bit like it before it became a slum. Light green paint, a front garden with a gate of wooden slats. But that doesn't happen often. It is most often my old house, gone good or gone wrong.

I lost my car last night. I had parked it in a street with recessed parking spaces, with trees and cute shops and restaurants, somewhere like perhaps some bits of Chelsea. It wasn't the Peugeot this time, it was my old Chevrolet Malibu. Of course, after a whole night's dreams that I can't remember I went back to that street and the car wasn't there. I kind of knew I was dreaming but didn't want to wake up to having lost my car.

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